Tony Kanaan is in his fifth CART FedEx Championship Series season
and his third with Mo Nunn Racing. This weekend's Rockingham 500
will be his 89th career Champ Car start. To date, Kanaan has one win
(1999 U.S. 500), two poles (1999 at Long Beach, 2001 at Chicago), six
podium finishes, 14 top-fives, and 44 top-10s.

Kanaan took over Mo Nunn Racing's #10 Pioneer- and
WorldCom-sponsored CART entry this season after driving the third-year
team's Hollywood-sponsored car in 2000 (Mercedes-Benz Reynard) and
2001 (Honda-powered Reynard).

A year ago here at Rockingham, Kanaan had the fastest car on the
racetrack during practice and warm-up during a weather- and
water-seepage-plagued weekend. Cars were gridded according to
championship points, however, as qualifying was washed out, leaving
Kanaan 10th on the grid on a track drivers found to be nearly impossible
to pass on. He managed an eighth-place finish.

Two weekends ago, on the streets of downtown Denver, Kanaan
qualified ninth and finished sixth in the inaugural Shell Grand Prix of
Denver. It was his fourth top-six finish in the last five events, at
streak that includes two podiums. Kanaan did not get to the podium in
Denver, but he left town still having etched his name into the record
books. His practice lap on Saturday morning in Denver of 1 minute, 1.601
seconds (96.252 mph) was the fastest tour of the 1.65-mile temporary
street circuit all weekend, which earned him the distinction of holding
the first-ever track record at the facility.

The previous weekend, at the inaugural Molson Indy Montreal,
Kanaan scored his second podium finish in four events, coming from the
13th starting position to a third-place finish that earned the team a
second Motorola Call of the Race Award in as many events. It was the
sixth podium of Kanaan's career and his third with Mo Nunn Racing.
He also finished third at the Molson Indy Vancouver on July 28.

Kanaan made another dramatic drive from the back of the pack at
The Grand Prix of Road America on Aug. 18 at Elkhart Lake, Wis. He made
a remarkable charge to a fourth-place finish from the 18th and final spot
on the starting grid. He failed to record a qualifying time as a
practice accident on Friday and mechanical trouble with the back-up car
on both Friday and Saturday set the team back. The effort on Sunday
earned the team's first Motorola Call of the Race Award this
season.

In that streak of three top-four finishes in four events from
Vancouver to Montreal, Kanaan conceivably could have had three podiums
and four top-four finishes in four events had it not been for a
mechanical failure with just 14 laps to go while running a solid third at
Mid-Ohio.

The sixth-place finish at Denver two weekends ago kept Kanaan in
the 13th position in the current driver standings with 63 points.

The recent streak of top finishes contrasts to a disappointing
string of DNFs at the first four events this season (Monterrey, Long
Beach, Japan's Twin Ring Motegi and Milwaukee). Kanaan scored only
his second championship point of the season with a 12th-place finish at
Laguna Seca. (He did earn one point for clocking the fastest lap of the
race at Motegi.) He followed that with eighth-place finishes at three of
the next four races (Portland, Chicago and Cleveland) before the podium
result at Vancouver.

At the Milwaukee event the first weekend of June, Kanaan debuted
a Lola chassis as the team made the switch from Reynard for the first
time in its two-plus years of existence. He qualified eighth after
running as high as third following Saturday-morning practice. In
Sunday's race, Kanaan moved from eighth to fourth on the very first
lap, and was running third when, on Lap 92, he was forced to retire from
the 250-lap event with an oil leak.

Kanaan's most promising performance this season came at
Japan's Twin Ring Motegi, where he qualified second, led a
race-high 72 laps, and recorded the fastest lap of the race before
retiring with a mechanical failure on Lap 121of a scheduled 201 laps.

On Memorial Day weekend, Kanaan competed in his first-ever
Indianapolis 500, joining Mo Nunn Racing's full-time Indy Racing
League driver Felipe Giaffone in a second Hollywood-sponsored team car.
Kanaan qualified fifth in the #17 Hollywood/Mo Nunn Racing Chevrolet
G-Force entry-- the fastest rookie qualifier in the 33-car
field-- and dominated the early stages of the race, leading 23 laps
in all before an ill-fated accident while running first on Lap 89.
Kanaan spun in the oil of fellow CART regular Bruno Junqueira, who
suffered a mechanical failure in Turn 3, and made heavy contact with the
outside wall. Kanaan was unhurt, but saw a promising day come to an
end. He clocked the third-fastest race lap. Giaffone, meanwhile, went
on to finish third in the #21 Hollywood/Mo Nunn Racing Chevrolet G-Force.

In 2001, Kanaan piloted the #55 Hollywood/Mo Nunn Racing
Honda-Reynard to ninth place in the driver points standings. He scored
points in 14 of his 19 starts last season, including eight consecutive
events from Toronto through Laguna Seca, and nine of the final 10 events
of the year. Season highlights included a third-place finish at Twin
Ring Motegi for the team's first and his fourth career podium, and
the pole qualifying effort on the mile oval at Chicago. He added
top-five finishes at Vancouver (fourth), Mid-Ohio (fifth) and the
500-mile season finale at Fontana (fifth). Kanaan had six top-five
qualifying efforts on the year (the pole at Chicago, third at Long Beach,
fourth at Motegi and Toronto, and fifth at Cleveland and Michigan). The
Cleveland (fifth), Toronto (fourth), Michigan (fifth) and Chicago (pole)
qualifying efforts came during consecutive events.

In 37 career starts on oval circuits, Kanaan has one win (1999
U.S. 500 at Michigan), four top-fives, and 15 top-10s.

Veteran race engineer Iain Watt joined Mo Nunn Racing this season
after working with Max Papis (1997-98), Cristiano da Matta (1999-2000)
and Dario Franchitti (2001) while at Cal Wells' Precision
Preparation team (1997-2000) and Team Green (2001) the previous five
seasons. Thus, Kanaan is working with a new engineer for the first time
since he first came to the U.S. to race in the Indy Lights series after
the 1995 season. He worked with Eric Cowdin enroute to Indy Lights
Rookie of the Year (1996) and the series championship (1997) honors while
at Tasman Motorsports, moved up with Cowdin and Tasman to the Champ Car
ranks and was CART Rookie of the Year in 1998, then moved to Mo Nunn
Racing with Cowdin after the 1999 season. Cowdin is engineering the
team's IRL entry this season. Don Lambert, who joined Mo Nunn
Racing last season as chief mechanic with the Pioneer-WorldCom
Honda-Reynard program, is Kanaan's chief mechanic this season and
is joined by a majority of the Pioneer-WorldCom crew from last season.

Longtime race engineer Morris Nunn is in his third season as CART
FedEx Championship Series team owner and his first in the Indy Racing
League. He founded Mo Nunn Racing just prior to the 2000 CART season
after leaving Target/Chip Ganassi Racing, where he was technical director
during consecutive series championships by Jimmy Vasser (1996), Alex
Zanardi (1997-98) and Juan Pablo Montoya (1999). Nunn also engineered
Emerson Fittipaldi's 1989 Indianapolis 500 victory and CART
championship while the two were with Patrick Racing.

This year, Nunn's team is splitting its time between
single-car entries in both CART (Tony Kanaan driving the #10
Pioneer-WorldCom/Mo Nunn Racing Honda-Lola) and the Indy Racing League
(Felipe Giaffone driving the #21 Hollywood/Mo Nunn Racing Chevrolet
G-Force). Giaffone earned the team's first-ever victory last month
at Kentucky Speedway and is clinched at least a fourth-place finish in
the driver championship with last weekend's sixth-place finish at
Chicagoland. The IRL wraps up its 2002 season this weekend at Texas
Motor Speedway, where Giaffone finished fifth in June.

TONY KANAAN

"Well, we're going back to Rockingham, where we had a very,
very good car last year but were never really able to do anything with
it. We have every reason to believe we can be fast there. Our car has
been very good on the small ovals, especially in Japan, where we
qualified on the front row and led the most laps. I guess my biggest
concern will be that we actually will be able to qualify our car. Last
year, we had the fastest car every time we were on the track for
practice. But we had to grid the cars based on points, and that put us
10th, and it was nearly impossible to pass on that track. So, first
things first, let's hope for good weather when it's time to
qualify and we'll be off to a good start ... I hope! We had a
rough start to the season, but we're slowing creeping toward the
top 10 in points. That's my goal ... to get into the top 10 by the
end of the season. That, and to get (team owner) Morris (Nunn) his first
CART win. Wouldn't it be great to do it right there in his
homeland with his family and friends there to see it? That's
motivation enough for me to do well. We've been getting into a
groove in the last several races ... top six in four of our last five
races, with two podiums. Now, it's time to move up a step or two
on the podium. Let's' Rock!'"